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Now the commander of the Amtrac woke up long enough to notice that he had company atop his vehicle. “Hey! You can’t shoot from here!”

“Why not?” asked Casey. “It doesn’t look like you’re shooting at anybody.”

I chose the gun turret platform as my firing platform, and the gunner stood there looking at me curiously, holding the trigger to his .50 caliber machine gun. I told him not to even fucking move, because if that turret shifted, it could crush me.

“Well, we might have to shoot,” the Amtrac commander protested, trying to get back in the game. Pouting little shit.

“By the time you find something to fire at, it’ll be too late,” Casey yelled. “Now get out of the way.” It was nice to have an officer around to holler at other officers.

I put the rifle to my shoulder and my eye to the scope as Casey ignored the incoming fire and scanned the field with his binos. He pointed to the west of the road. “About a half mile away, six guys in black,” he said. We painted them with a laser at 922 yards, and I dialed in the dope, thinking, Oh, Ym gonna VC your asses, dudes. This aint Vietnam, and I aint afraid of no ghosts.

I chose a target on the far left, a guy whose RPK light machine gun was merrily chattering away, and clicked two minutes right to my scope to shift the crosshairs to the middle of his body mass. Then I caressed the trigger, and the bullet hit two inches from the center of his chest, flipping him violently backward as his automatic weapon hit the dirt. I exhaled and worked the bolt to put in a new round. That’s one. Who’s next?

Daniel had gone back to the trucks at Casey’s direction. Our armored Humvees were wheeling into position to fire as Castillo and Marsh got ready to open up on the bushes.

A few seconds later, I found another guy about fifty yards to the right of my first target and adjusted the scope to nine plus four, tacking on some more right windage, aimed at his center mass. Squeeeeze, bang, recoil, eye still in the scope, and this AK-toting asshole took it right through the chin, the bullet drilling a hole the size of a silver dollar in his head and sending teeth and jawbone fragments flying out of the skull and onto the desert floor. Damn. How could I have hit so high when I was aiming at his chest? He must have moved.

Other Marines had joined the fight by now. As they moved forward to clear the area, I had to stop. The bad guys scattered or died.

Our own battalion pulled up a few minutes later, and we parked our nine hundred Marines and 112 vehicles in the median strip of the broad highway, leaving room for other vehicles to continue moving on both sides of the road.

I waited for things to settle down and then had another private little off-the-record talk with McCoy as we walked the perimeter. Despite just having come out of a major battle in Al Kut, he was up to speed on everything that had happened within his battalion, including the casualties and my problems with Officer Bob. Plenty of senior staff members had watched Bob’s actions with growing concern.

I knew the Boss would never say anything critical of any officer in front of me, but I told him that I was being kept on the wrong side of the door in this freakin’ war and was only getting into action almost by accident.

The colonel was as tired as the rest of us but told me to calm down. “You got how many, now?”

“Fourteen confirmed, boss. Should have been more, but I either get there late or get yanked out early.”

McCoy nodded and said the time had come for that to change. He wanted my rifle where it would do the most good. I would roam the battlefield, he said, with Casey and the boys going along to cover my ass.

Finally, the green light of freedom that would get me out from under Bob’s thumb, a deal blessed by Darkside Six himself! McCoy’s aggressive philosophy was to get his killers in position to kill, and I knew there was going to be a lot of killing going on in the next few days.

18

Push, Push, Push

The 3rd Infantry Division had captured